New, rare or unreliable equipment

[DRG]

The reason we say things like "Players would never..." is because we've been doing this for 18 years and have a pretty good idea of the average player.

It's fine to present new ideas, we are open to them but in this case you are not offering any thoughts on how to implement them and we have years of experience putting things in and finding the pitfalls

so........

* Raise the points price for new or rare equipment.

*********The ONLY way to do this would be to add new units a month or two at a time and that works for every OOB but the German one......it's full and it's NOT going to be enlarged as the only way to enlarge it is to re-write the code from the ground up and if we do that the existing game dies

* Make only a limited number of the newest or rarest equipment available in scenarios and campaigns.

********* What is put into scenarios is up to scenario designers..........HOW exactly do you think we could limit that ?? As for campaigns.......the AI already is limited.......the players can police themselves

* Make breakdowns more probable for notoriously unreliable equipment like early Panthers. There could even be a chance for them to start a scenario immobilized.

************ So.........to do that would require a "breakdown" number added to the OOB's........the problem there is THERE ARE NO SPACES LEFT TO ADD....AFAIK there are no code left that is reserved for " new entires"...and on top of that game data for save games and sceanrios has a set read order they are read and tossing in a new one makes for a very high probablity that all old save games and scenarios would be unreadable becasue suddenly there is a new number added to the order that scrambles the old order which the game reads when loading

As well...........any new feature at this stange of development has to pass the " Will Don and Andy Use it" test as we are the ones that would need to spend the countless man hours to add it.......then fix all the problems that pop up after it's added that we didn't anticipate ( as years of experience have taught us to expect...).........if it doesn't pass that test is doesn't go in and this one doens't pass the test BUT.......to add this would ,as I said, require a "breakdown chance number" entry added to EVERY unit in the both games and even assuming that wouldn't cause any knockoff effects to save games , secure PBEM games and scenarios that's 48,918 entires that would need to be individually set......now..... many of those would be leg units that would not require a break down value but still we are into multiple thousands of entries that would each need to be checked and cross checked that we don't make the a tank a 4 in one OOB anda 5 in another......( then the debates start that army A had much better repair facilities and higher skilled mechanics so they should get a lower breakdown chance than army B who didn't ) then we get into the subjective aspect of this........if 0 = no chance of breakdown and 6 high chance of breakdown..........what number do we add for a Sherman?..........what number do we add for a T-34?..........what number do we add for a Comet? .......?..........what number do we add for a Tiger?..............what number do we add for a Type 2 Ho-I ???? that won't generate endless rivet counting debate for a feature that we didn't agree with in the first place??

What I see... and what I think Andy sees is a HUGE amount of work for something that we belive most players ( and us...... ) would simply turn off . I THINK something liike that has been presented MAYBE once or twice in the past and there is little support for it

Don